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The New York Review of Books engagement report

@nybooks - 2.1M followers on X

Measured over 265 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on October 25, 2026.

Engagement

Bottom 10% for its size
Per follower
0.001%
of 2.1M followers
Per impression
0.225%
4.9K views on a typical post
Reach
0.24%
of its followers see a post
Typical post
11
interactions (median)
Saved
0.082%
4 bookmarks on a typical post
Posting rate
9.4/day
active 103% of days
Peak time
15:00 UTC
Friday

A typical post picks up 11 interactions against 2.1M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 265 original posts, its engagement rate beats 7% of 20,444 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 4.9K times each, and 0.225% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.238% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 9.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on almost every day in the window. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 265 posts sampled, 99% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 945 interactions, about 86x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #dante, #goethe, #petrarch.

Measured over 265 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on October 25, 2026. Recurring tags: #dante, #goethe, #petrarch.

Compared with accounts its own size

The New York Review of Books's engagement rate beats 7% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (20,444 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 10 of 10)). A percentile is spread evenly by construction, so 50 really is the middle of that group and 90 really is its top tenth.

On engagement per impression rather than per follower it beats 16% of the same group. When those two numbers disagree, the gap is about how far its posts travel rather than how people react to them.

Where this sits in the catalog

At 0.001%, The New York Review of Books sits below the 10th percentile of the 205,152 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the bottom 25% band, which runs below 0.024%.

p100.004%
p250.024%
p50 (median)0.143%
p750.678%
p902.55%
p9982.4%
Engagement rate as a share of followers, across the 205,152 accounts we have scanned enough to measure. The axis is logarithmic, because the top and bottom of this population are about 22,894 times apart and a linear axis would flatten everything below the median into a single point.
Show the percentile table
Engagement rate percentiles
PercentileEngagement rate
10th percentile0.004%
25th percentile0.024%
50th percentile0.143%
75th percentile0.678%
90th percentile2.55%
99th percentile82.4%

This ruler is the whole measured catalog, not a size-matched group: it shows where the raw rate falls across every account we can measure, all of which are large. For a like-for-like comparison, read the size-band percentile above instead. See how the bands are built

Posting timing

This account posts most often around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is its busiest day of the week. The bars below are the catalog-wide pattern, with this account's own busiest slot marked. They do not show how this account performs at each hour: we keep one aggregate per account, not one per hour, so that measurement does not exist in our data.

Engagement by hour posted, UTCTwenty-four bars, one per UTC hour. Each bar shows how posts published in that hour compare with their own authors' median engagement. Bars above the centre line ran higher than the median, bars below ran lower. A marker flags Busiest hour: 15:00 UTC.
0003060912151821
Above the authors' own mediansBelowScale: plus or minus 111%Busiest hour: 15:00 UTC
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
Engagement by hour posted, UTC
Hour (UTC)Vs author medianPosts
00:00 UTC-1%89K
01:00 UTC-2%90K
02:00 UTC-3%88K
03:00 UTC-4%94K
04:00 UTC-5%76K
05:00 UTC-4%75K
06:00 UTC-5%86K
07:00 UTC-5%93K
08:00 UTC-4%108K
09:00 UTC-4%124K
10:00 UTC-3%129K
11:00 UTC-3%141K
12:00 UTC-3%154K
13:00 UTC-3%167K
14:00 UTC-4%173K
15:00 UTC-2%176K
16:00 UTC-3%171K
17:00 UTC-3%159K
18:00 UTC-2%149K
19:00 UTC-2%141K
20:00 UTC-1%131K
21:00 UTC0%116K
22:00 UTC-2%100K
23:00 UTC-1%90K
Engagement by day of weekSeven bars, one per weekday, Sunday first. Each bar shows how posts published on that day compare with their own authors' median engagement. Bars above the centre line ran higher than the median, bars below ran lower. A marker flags Busiest day: Friday.
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
Above the authors' own mediansBelowScale: plus or minus 111%Busiest day: Friday
Show engagement by day of week as a table
Engagement by day of week
DayVs author medianPosts
Sunday+5%393K
Monday+1%483K
Tuesday-2%520K
Wednesday-3%472K
Thursday-2%430K
Friday-3%447K
Saturday+2%393K
See what moves engagement across the whole catalogWhat counts as a good engagement rate at this size

Formats this account uses

Its own posting mix on the left, and what each of those formats does across every account we track on the right. Only formats where the effect clears our publish test appear here, so an empty row is a format we could not measure rather than one that does nothing.

This account's posting mix compared with catalog-wide effects
FormatThis accountCatalog effect95% intervalAccounts behind it
Image or video0% of posts+111%+108% to +115%34K
Outbound link99% of posts-41%-42% to -40%32K
Typical length-no effect-2% to -1%42K
  • 0% of this account's sampled posts carry an image or video. Across the catalog, posts with an image or video run 111% above the same accounts' other posts.
  • 99% of its posts carry a link off X. Across the catalog, posts with an outbound link run 41% below the same accounts' other posts, so a large share of this account's output sits in the weakest bucket we measure.
  • Its average post runs 193 characters, which falls in the 180 - 280 characters band. Across the catalog, posts of 180 to 280 characters match the same accounts' other posts almost exactly.

These are catalog-wide differences applied to this account's own posting mix, not a measurement of how each format performs for this account specifically. We keep one median per account, not one per format per account, so the second thing is not something this data can tell you.

Best tweets

  • Oct 8, 202686x their median

    Congratulations to Anne Carson, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. https://t.co/p6iUafoipH

    76715417723K viewsView on X
  • Aug 16, 202626x their median

    "Like all ingenues, she is blonde and has precisely two enemies" I reviewed Maddie's Secret for the NYRB: https://t.co/jAF4c54mHl

    28142117K viewsView on X
  • Sep 16, 202622x their median

    “Neither the political left nor the Muslim world...has in the past century offered a form of anti-Jewish prejudice anywhere near as coherent, influential, and dangerous as that of their right-wing counterparts.” —Omer Bartov https://t.co/psyCA9Y52X

    176498834K viewsView on X
  • Oct 13, 202615x their median

    Some of America’s most influential AI leaders believe advanced AI could secure permanent American global supremacy. Are they right? That conviction has received too little scrutiny at home—but considerable attention in Beijing. I examine it in my new essay for @nybooks. The new AI primacists envision what I call “recursive advantage”: AI enabling the leading country to advance so quickly that no rival can ever catch up. The hope of securing that dominance—and the fear of falling permanently behind—give both Washington and Beijing reasons to keep accelerating, even as the risks of losing control grow. There are strong reasons to maintain an American lead in AI. But securing the benefits of staying ahead does not require a permanent monopoly. Read it here: https://t.co/ykmKcS3qHX

    122323515K viewsView on X
  • Aug 21, 202612x their median

    “We don’t want to lose Socratic intellectualism. It’s an ethical theory worth considering that gets obscured with the image of Socrates as a skeptic.” —@AgnesCallard, in conversation with Merve Emre https://t.co/56iHZwjIQW

    98281324K viewsView on X
  • Aug 25, 202611x their median

    After reading Wolfgang Koeppen’s novels, “I wondered what on earth had just happened to me; it seemed I’d been tuned, sharpened, elasticized—reformulated with better neurons.” —Deborah Eisenberg https://t.co/Z8oqUg1iIz

    106151116K viewsView on X
  • Oct 4, 202611x their median

    Peter E. Gordon on the legacy of Jürgen Habermas https://t.co/hgvCk0Sq1G

    97230223K viewsView on X
  • Sep 29, 202610x their median

    Václav Havel on how to defy an authoritarian state https://t.co/rvwvKePFjG

    83281118K viewsView on X
  • Sep 30, 20269.2x their median

    “What we are witnessing is a spectacle of computational power staged to acquire market share, and with it control of a landscape that extends well beyond mathematics.” —Dan Rockmore https://t.co/Nmkrzwot2f

    75223129K viewsView on X
  • Aug 25, 20268.4x their median

    Yiyun Li on Qian Zhongshu’s satirical masterpiece, Fortress Besieged https://t.co/CWlgtAcQlh

    79111118K viewsView on X

Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

Recurring topics

#dante#goethe#petrarch#shakespeare

The most frequent hashtags in the sampled posts. They describe what this account writes about; they are not a performance signal, and the catalog-wide breakdown on the hub shows how little hashtag count moves.

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Reading these numbers

A typical post picks up 11 interactions against 2.1M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 265 original posts, its engagement rate beats 7% of 20,444 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 4.9K times each, and 0.225% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.238% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 9.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on almost every day in the window. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 265 posts sampled, 99% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 945 interactions, about 86x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #dante, #goethe, #petrarch.

What is The New York Review of Books's engagement rate on X?
The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) has an engagement rate of 0.001%, based on the median interactions across 265 original posts from the last 30 days against 2,052,277 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
Is that a good engagement rate?
At 0.001%, The New York Review of Books sits below the 10th percentile of the 205,152 accounts in this comparison. Those comparison accounts are all large ones, because our scanning cadence is weighted towards big accounts, so this is a ranking among peers of similar scale rather than a ranking across X.
Does @nybooks have real engagement?
Its engagement rate beats 7% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (20,444 accounts), which puts it in the bottom 10% for its size group. Ranking inside a size band matters because engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so a raw rate would mostly re-measure the follower count. It is a starting point for a look at follower quality, not a verdict on it.
When does @nybooks post?
Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is its busiest day, at roughly 9.4 posts per day across the measured window.

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